I kind of agree. Unique apps have a small chance, easily substituted apps have no chance.
It's actually a very nice little snowglobe model of how all the other markets work. You can be told a hundred times that your solution must stand out from the crowd, but there is nothing like seeing 10 identical copies of your application competing with you side by side. That really gets the message through.
The other fun part is addressable market fallacy - it's easy for a junior entreprenuer to say that "game market on iPhone is 13 Million people * $10 / year and if we only get one percent of that we'll have 1.3 million". It's also easy to get proven wrong really, really quickly.
The way I see it App Store is converging to the mean - your typical market where consumer's biggest problem is choice as there is too much competition. The solutions to this problem that will emerge will likely be similar as well.
It's actually a very nice little snowglobe model of how all the other markets work. You can be told a hundred times that your solution must stand out from the crowd, but there is nothing like seeing 10 identical copies of your application competing with you side by side. That really gets the message through.
The other fun part is addressable market fallacy - it's easy for a junior entreprenuer to say that "game market on iPhone is 13 Million people * $10 / year and if we only get one percent of that we'll have 1.3 million". It's also easy to get proven wrong really, really quickly.
The way I see it App Store is converging to the mean - your typical market where consumer's biggest problem is choice as there is too much competition. The solutions to this problem that will emerge will likely be similar as well.